Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Please Search Hand-Pulled Noodles Near Me

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

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After the ghost kitchen they worked at is shut down, a group of robots decide to start up their own restaurant serving hand-pulled noodles, but anti-robot prejudice threatens their success. Immediately after reading this book, I looked up the nearest place I could get my hands on hand-pulled noodles, so in that regard this has been an absolute success. I have never had them before but I am somehow craving them anyway. I picked up this book because it’s been so highly recommended on Cannonball […]

A Matter of “Pure Will”?

Voss by Patrick White

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I have an embarrassing confession to make: I have never read anything written by Patrick White. It’s odd, and somewhat disappointing really, that our only Australian-born Nobel Laureate for literature is so frequently passed over. For example, I never heard his name brought up once when I was studying English. He doesn’t seem to have much of a profile outside of Australia either. (Unlike say, Gerald Murnane, who seems to be slightly more recognized here in the US than at home.) So, I made the […]

“If I were to live here in Cardiff, by the sea, I think that another self would emerge in me. My soul.”

Cardiff, By the Sea by Joyce Carol Oates

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Joyce Carol Oates presents four uneasy novellas of suspense, all of which are centered around a woman in peril, often from the male forces in her life. Cardiff, by the Sea – 3.5 stars Clare, an academic who was adopted as a toddler, returns to her unknown past when she unexpectedly inherits a house from her birth grandmother, but what she learns about her birth family leaves her unmoored. I loved the prose in this novella (as I did in all of them), as well […]

Food Glorious Food: Eating the “Other” in 1930s Taiwan

Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-Zi

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Anglophones miss how central food is to most other cultures. Our conversational starters revolve around the weather as a way of breaking the ice with a stranger, whereas food has become just a source of fuel. In many other languages “Have you eaten yet?” as a greeting is a way to metaphorically (and sometimes literally) break bread. In Taiwan Travelogue, food brings together a Japanese travel writer, Aoyama, and her Taiwanese translator, Chizuru, but also seeks to highlight their different tastes. Ideas of the high-culture […]

“The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.”

Heartburn: A Novel by Nora Ephron

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Heartburn is a short humorous novel about an unfunny topic — a marriage falling apart. It is based on true events — Ephron’s marriage to Carl Bernstein and his infidelity. The main character and narrator is Rachel Samstat, a cookbook author and TV personality married to Mark Feldman, a prominent syndicated journalist. Both Rachel and Mark are on their second marriages, and Rachel is pregnant with their second child when she discovers Mark’s infidelity. This novel is about her reaction to that discovery and the […]

One Thousand and One Nights… But Horny?

One thousand and one nights by Hanan Al-Shaykh

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  The Arabian Nights feels like an orientalist’s wet dream. A loose collection of stories from across South and South West Asia, it was first translated from Arabic by the othering gaze of a Frenchman, giving us many of the tropes peddled across literature from eroticised harams to conniving conmen. This re-telling sits in a strange liminal space, written by a Lebanese writer living in London, a collection of 19 tales repackaged for an adult audience. And an Adult audience it is. The women in […]



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